


your hand in my hand, so still and discreet.

by bbuckyy



Series: i'd be home with you - fae jaskier [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Creature Fic, Creature Jaskier | Dandelion, Fae & Fairies, Fae Jaskier | Dandelion, Love Confessions, M/M, POV Jaskier | Dandelion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23164333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbuckyy/pseuds/bbuckyy
Summary: jaskier wakes one morning to find that he isn't quite himself. throughout the day, he learns about who he was before becoming a bard, before meeting geralt, before he saw his mother taken from him.sister fic to my work "so long we'd become the flowers", this time from jaskier's pov
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: i'd be home with you - fae jaskier [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1665115
Comments: 11
Kudos: 245





	your hand in my hand, so still and discreet.

Jaskier had gone to bed that night feeling rather queasy, to be frank. Although, to be even franker, he usually felt queasy after leaving a town the way they just had. In fairness, how was he possibly to know that that woman was married? And how in the world was he supposed to intuit that her husband would be 2 metres of solid muscle and ale stench? Really, he had no idea why everyone was so upset about the whole ordeal, it was only _three_ nights, and only _eight_ rounds, what was the big fuss? Especially Geralt. Jaskier didn’t have the slightest inkling as to why Geralt was angry with him (beyond the usual, of course: talking too much, touching too much, being a general nuisance). It wasn’t like Jaskier hadn’t had affairs before, or rather, like Jaskier hadn’t been the _subject_ of the affairs before. Greta, or Nadia, or whatever her name was was merely another woman added to his long, long, oh-so-long list of conquests. Nonetheless, he, Geralt, and Roach had had to leave the village in a rush, no doubt leaving several things behind.

They ate their meager supper in silence, as they often did after departing in such a rush, and set up their bedrolls on opposite sides of their roaring campfire. Jaskier could feel Geralt’s eyes on his back for the entire night, and oh, such eyes. Such glimmering, smoldering, sparkling golden eyes that lay beneath his brows like nuggets of gold ore deep in a dwarven mine, surrounded by coarse stone and gravel, yet begging to be unearthed and shown to the world. Jaskier often wondered if Geralt noticed how much time he spent looking at those eyes- at all of him, really. True, he had those tricky Witcher senses that could hear two mice fucking three kilometres away, but he was also the most oblivious idiot to ever walk the Continent.

That night he revisited an old recurring dream, one that he hadn’t had in a long while, years, probably. He was a child, no more than a toddler, and his mother was placing something around his neck. Just as she finished, she was grabbed from behind and dragged into the flames surrounding them, screams echoing in his ears for what felt like months, clutching onto the token on his neck like it was his heart, like it was his life.

He woke up to his name.

“ _Jaskier!_ ”

He opened his eyes with a grumble to see a very sharp sword pointed straight at his nose. He saw that Geralt was attached to the other end of it, and he recognized the hilt and the knuckleguard, but something was off about the blade itself. It was radiating this, this _warmth_ and _energy_ like it had just been pulled out of the forge. It scared Jaskier. Not quite as much as the look in Geralt’s eyes, though.

“Woah, Geralt! Don’t you think it’s a little early for this?”

“Fucking get up.” Something was wrong. As blunt and severe as Geralt was prone to be, he was never _commanding_ to Jaskier. Never spoke to him as if he were a piece of livestock with a tendency to leave the herd and meander amongst the grasses of another shepherd’s pasture.

“I- I don’t understand what’s going on...”

“I said get up!” Okay, right, he means business. Jaskier pushed a hand under himself and tried to roll onto the balls of his feet, but something was immediately off. Instead of springing up with all the grace of a newborn giraffe as he usually did, he promptly fell backwards onto the ground, a strange new weight having attached itself to his back. As he let out a poignant and dignified “ _ow, shit!_ ” he craned his neck to peek over his shoulders as best he could in his prone position.

Yeah, definitely something wrong. There was a large brown mound connected to each of his shoulders, each weighing twenty pounds at the very least. He pushed himself off the ground (compensating for the extra weight this time) and realized the only possible explanation: he’d been attacked by some vengeful monster attempting to wreak havoc on a Witcher and his poor bard as repayment for the slaying of his brethren. Jaskier, ever the poet, cried out, “What the fuck? Geralt, Geralt, get it off of me! What is this, a fucking drowner?” as he tried to rid himself of the pest by spinning himself around in graceful, nimble circles.

Geralt, stoic as ever, merely commanded, “Jaskier, shut the fuck up and _look_.”

Twirling himself around a few more times for flair and flair alone, Jaskier finally stood still and really studied the attachments to his back. Sure enough, it wasn’t a drowner (to be completely honest, Jaskier still didn’t quite know what a drowner looked like, even after all those years), wasn’t really _anything_ he could identify before he tensed a muscle in his back. By the gods themselves, the thing moved with it. He tensed it some more, hardly even sparing it a thought, and the thing unfolded itself into a broad, feathered wing. He didn’t even realize his hands had drifted to his face until his hot breath reflected back into his already steaming eyes. He looked over the other shoulder and, sure enough, another wing unfolded itself entirely in accordance with Jaskier's will. He shuddered as he felt the breeze rush through the feathers and flow around the massive limbs expanding themselves from his back. His ear twitched and he noticed Geralt shift.

He lowered his hands and looked at his Witcher, not even bothering to hide the fear in his eyes. “Geralt, what happened to me?” Surely this had to be a curse, or a hex, or a jinx, or whatever other word there was for magical vengeance. Surely this had to be someone acting unfairly in anger and damning him to this freakish fate.

Geralt softened, rather uncharacteristically. “I was hoping you could tell me.”.

All Jaskier could do now was keep doing what he could with these new wings, seeing if maybe they’d go away if he’d just flex hard enough. “I- I- I-”

Geralt dropped his sword and approached him tenderly. “Are you in pain?” Jaskier wasn’t expecting any sort of question like that. Accusations of lying? Certainly. Swearing and blame for this curse? Most definitely. But concern? Worry? Very bottom of Jaskier’s list of possible outcomes, that was for sure.

For a moment he pondered the question. Was he in pain? Was the adrenaline of this surprise clouding his senses and shielding him from agony? Or did this weight actually feel comfortable, familiar even? Did moving these wings come just as easily as dancing his fingers along his lute, or spilling nonsense words out into the air in the hopes that Geralt would take enough notice to even tell him off? Was not the feeling of the wind between his feathers an intimate, natural sensation? Jaskier searched for the words with which to present his thoughts. “I… _no_ …” He looked up at Geralt in unashamed desperation. “It feels as if I’ve had them my whole life, really.”

Geralt sighed and ran a hand along his face while Jaskier trembled where he stood. “Did you make anyone particularly angry recently?” Like that was at all a helpful question. The day no one was mad at Jaskier was the day that Hell froze over and Geralt laughed. “Are you- are you missing anything?”.

Jaskier felt himself pale as he grappled for the medallion that once hung around his neck. He felt pieces to a puzzle revealing themselves in his brain, but he couldn’t connect them, couldn’t quite define their shape or what they might form. “Yes… yes, I had a- a medallion, my mother gave it to me.” He gave up all pretense of grace and composure and searched frantically amongst his and Geralt’s things. He looked under bedrolls, between doublets, within pockets, trying to remember its weight around his neck and its cool smoothness between his fingers.

“Jas- Jaskier,” Geralt coughed and looked away, showing embarrassment that Jaskier rarely got to see, “you might want to check your… arse.”

Exactly what he needed right now. An arse joke. The one time Geralt cracks wise and it’s during a time of significant emotional turmoil.

“Geralt, I hardly think this is the time for joking-” He humoured Geralt by reaching onto his bum, but dropped his offended disposition as soon as he felt what Geralt was referring to. He reached down the waistline of his trousers and pulled out, inch by inch, a long brown tail, equal in length to his legs and covered in the sort of short hair that covers a horse, only with a graceful tuft of fur at the tip. He flexed the muscles in his lower back just as he had when he realized his control of his wings, and felt the humanity drip from his body onto the forest floor below as the tail swished and swayed behind his legs.

“Holy shit.” Just like before with his feathers, the brush of his tail against his calves was disturbingly familiar, unearthing emotions not quite yet remembered, but carrying with them a sense of yearning for a home long lost.

Geralt spoke up with astounding gentleness. “I’d guess there are two possible explanations here: either you’ve been cursed by some poor victim of your exploits, or that medallion was more important than you thought.”

“What are you saying, Geralt?”

“I’m saying that that might have been a glamour.” Jaskier tried his very best to be threatening by unfolding his wings behind him and swishing his tail about.

“A _what_?”

“A glamour. Like a… magical disguise.”

“A magical disguise for being what, a fucking bird?”

“No way to be sure for now, but we’d better find a mage to see if that’s the case.” The nerve on this man, insinuating that he was anything less than human. Although, in fairness, what little humanity he had left seemed to be disappearing before his very eyes.

Jaskier stood nearly frozen while Geralt packed their things. A breeze blew from behind him and brushed through his fingers and onto his recently-exposed bottom. He realized that half of his arse had been left hanging out of his breeches after he pulled his tail out and flushed with embarrassment. He meant to move swiftly and with grace as he pulled his dagger out from his pack, but he could feel how slowly he was moving, as if every hair- and feather- on his body had been chained to the ground, weighing him down with the reality of his predicament. He sliced into his breeches along the seam of the seat and pulled his tail through, hardly even registering his actions as real. Jaskier could feel Geralt’s eyes burning into him from where he crouched, shoving things haphazardly into a leather satchel. He was probably contemplating ways to kill this new monster he’d discovered. Imagining how he would wear a necklace adorned with feathers from the rare species _Jaskier_ _bardum_. Whatever he was plotting, Jaskier didn’t want those eyes to leave him. He wanted to savour being _looked_ at for once. No matter Geralt’s definite ill will, Jaskier was willing to bask in his attention. Appreciated while it lasted. While _he_ lasted.

Suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder, and Jaskier whipped around to see those gold, gold eyes staring into him. “Are you okay, Jas?”

Jaskier knew that Geralt would see (and smell) through his facade in an instant, but why not at least pretend to have some dignity left? “Yeah! Tip-top.” He had felt his teeth growing and sharpening in his mouth as he waited for Geralt to finish packing, and now only feared that Geralt saw them as he grinned a farce.

“We should start on the way to the next town if we want to make it there before nightfall.”

“Right. Yes. Of course. Lead the way.”

...

The road to Milgrove was long and uninteresting. Jaskier thought that he might be able to write a song about the flowers on the trees if only he had an ounce of happiness in him. He didn’t bother trying to hide his crying every time he bit his lip with those new sharp teeth of his, or felt his tail brush against his calves, or tickled himself with his feathers. He felt Geralt look at him awkwardly every time he sniffled or gasped, and treasured each accidental touch on a wing, however uncomfortable it made him. A few hours in (Jaskier didn’t bother trying to keep track of time, he knew he would probably be killed once they figured out what he was, and he wanted to savour his life while it lasted), Geralt cleared his throat abruptly.

“Um, Jaskier, you…” He touched his temples, looking just above Jaskier’s eyes in confusion and disbelief. Jaskier’s heart pounded as he reached a hand up to his forehead, afraid of what he might find. His heart dropped as his fingers brushed against something smooth and solid protruding from his temples, curving slightly and coming to a point a few inches up.

He stopped walking and let himself collapse onto the dirt road, holding his head in his hands (careful not to touch his horns for fear of making them real) and sheltered himself with his wings. This was it. He’d reached his breaking point. He might as well drop his walls and let it all come out in heaving, wet sobs.

“What’s happening to me Geralt? Why me, why now?” There was silence for a moment before Jaskier felt a gloved hand come to rest solidly upon his back, just between his wings. This was new. Geralt had touched him plenty of times, pulling him out of rivers, dragging him away from monsters, _punching him in the fucking bollocks_ , but never gently like this. Never with so noble a goal as comforting a broken, deformed bard such as he.

“Jaskier, it’ll be alright. We’ll fix this.”

He only cried more, forcing words out of his throat with great difficulty. “And if we can’t?”

He felt the silence between them as Geralt paused, contemplating his next sentence. “If it’s not something we can fix, then it must not have needed fixing in the first place.”

…

Jaskier stood in the forest, fully aware of the elven mage’s eyes on him. He had said his name was Enleim a few minutes before, not even bothering with a handshake as he began to survey Jaskier with a twinkle in his eye.

“Hmm… and you said you lost a medallion, yes?”

Jaskier tried to imagine its weight around his neck and its texture upon his sternum, but he couldn’t. “Yes, it was my mother’s. Haven’t taken it off since she died.”

Enleim made another low circle around Jaskier, ducking under his wings and stepping over his tail before bringing himself back up to eye level. He squinted slightly, “How old are you, Jaskier?” His thick, runny accent hung in the air with the strangeness of his question.

“I’m th- thirty-seven.”

“Now, surely you don’t believe that. Nearly forty and yet you still have the face of a babe.” Jaskier looked up at Geralt for some answers, but was disappointed. “No, I suspect you are much older. Who knows? Maybe even older than your Witcher there.” He retreated into himself, scared of confronting the implications of the mage’s remarks.

“I… what are you saying?”

“Well, if my suspicions are correct- and they usually are- then I don’t think you’re human. If I were a betting man, I’d say you were a Fae.”

Fae. Ff-ay-ee. Jaskier sounded it out in his mind, rolling it over his tongue and tossing it between his ears, not bothering to realize what it meant, shielding himself off from what was happening around him.

Distantly, as if he were underwater, Jaskier heard Geralt speak, “Fae don’t exist anymore. They’re a myth.”

“Well, perhaps they aren’t being born anymore, but they live a long time, as evidenced by your friend.”

Jaskier stared at his hands, tracing their lines with his eyes, with his human-not-human, never-human, never-normal, now-a-monster eyes. He felt something clawing at his throat. Tears? Words? A scream loud enough to deafen everyone in the next three towns? “I don’t understand. I- I’m just…” What was he? Who was he now that he was not Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount of Lettenhove? Who was he if not the little boy who played knucklebones with the maids’ children, or the young man who lusted after everyone with pretty eyes, or the bard who decided to fall in love with someone who would never love him back? Without all that, he was just… “ _Jaskier_.”

…

Jaskier had lost whatever dignity he had left that night, sobbing into Geralt’s armor. He was painfully aware of the weight of the wings on his back, and his sharp teeth in his mouth, and the touch of his tail against his legs. He had spent the whole day praying for a cure, for some potion or surgery that could rid him of these marks of inhumanity, only to be told that, not only was he never getting rid of them, but he’d had them all along. Throughout all of his blubbering, though, Geralt held firm. He stroked Jaskier’s hair, hushed his sobs, tried to lay a hand on his wing, but removed it once it only made him weep more.

After a few hours, he stopped crying and resigned himself to merely stare at the stars, trying- and failing- to distract himself from his body. He remembered the previous night’s dream, each moment coming more and more into focus the more he connected the day’s events to his childhood. He saw the shape of his mother’s horns, the touch of his mother’s wings against his, the glint of her fangs when she smiled.

“Before my mother died, I remember a fire. I must’ve been… three, at most, though who knows how true to reality that is. There were people screaming and running- I think they were family and neighbors- and my mother placed the medallion around my neck. It was a buttercup, encased in this… crystal. And then there were arms around her, and she was pulled away, and she was… screaming…” Jaskier scoured the sky for familiar constellations, trying to remember the nights his father spent showing him the shapes their ancestors had traced in the heavens. “It really all makes sense. I- I mean, I _know_ I’m thirty-seven, I met you when I was eighteen and I’ve been with you nineteen years since, and yet, I haven’t changed, have I? Hell, I still have trouble growing a beard.” He struggled with the mental maths. Had he been eighteen when they met? How many years had he spent with the viscount before he left? How many times had he seen his nannies pregnant, how many grey hairs had his governess grown before she retired and was replaced?

He looked at his feet. They seemed to be the only human part left of him. “After that I moved in with the Viscount Pankratz and his wife. And-and I know that Enleim said the glamour could affect my memory, but-but I’ve never been anything but human since! I mean, I get hungry, I bleed, I fuck, I cry, I play my lute... and now all of a sudden… I’m not anymore.”

Silence hung between them for a moment, Jaskier massaging his own fingers while Geralt breathed. The silence was broken by Geralt’s coarse voice. “Before the Trials I had parents. I’m not sure if they loved me, but I had them. They sent me off to Kaer Morhen, and I… changed. They mutated me, forced me to turn inhuman. After a few years, I returned to Rivia to hunt a bruxae, and my parents didn’t even recognize me until I said my name. They were afraid of me, said Witchers were dirty monsters. After I told them who I was, they didn’t speak to me at all.”

Jaskier took a deep breath. He dropped his head against Geralt’s armoured shoulder, trying to ignore the way his horns brushed against Geralt’s jaw. Emboldened by Geralt’s lack of complaints, Jaskier unfolded a wing and wrapped it around them like a muscular, feathered blanket.

They sat like this for a moment, Jaskier contemplating how he’d say goodbye when Geralt finally decided to unsheath his silver sword, when he felt a hand come to rest upon his thigh. He removed his head from Geralt’s shoulder and stared into those wide, amber eyes. For the first time in nineteen years, Geralt looked almost panicked.

Suddenly Jaskier was thrust into the back of his own brain, and watched as his hands came to cup Geralt’s jaw and pull him into a kiss. Distantly, beneath the sound of his pounding heart, he heard Geralt let out a rather _soft_ sound for a Witcher, and he felt hands find their way to his waist. Geralt parted his lips, and Jaskier invited him in, tasting this man with an inhuman tongue and hearing his breath with pointed ears. They moved together, one set of hands pushing their way up a chemise, another tangling themselves in soft white hair.

Jaskier came up for air and stared at Geralt, eyes wide and mouth agape. What words could follow that? How could he defend himself, explain himself? “I… I thought you wouldn’t want me because I’m- I _was_ \- human.” Jaskier had to stop and remind himself that he wasn’t human, never had been. He pushed that thought aside for later. “I was too fragile, too emotional for you.”

Geralt let out a gruff chuckle, “I thought you wouldn’t want me because I’m _not_ human.”

Jaskier closed his eyes and tried to rest his forehead upon Geralt’s, but settled for mere proximity when he found that his horns got in the way. “What do you know? We’ve both been proven wrong. In more ways than one.”

**Author's Note:**

> so this was meant to be a birthday present to myself since i turned 17 a few weeks ago, but then i got really sick and someone close to me passed away, so i had to postpone it a little. hope you enjoyed, and i love comments!!!  
> (also btw, there's more of an epilogue in my original fic, if you wanna check out that one, too :-D)


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